Tag Archives: English culture

I was raised in a very Anglo home. I read P.G. Wodehouse, Jerome K. Jerome, Aldous Huxley, Orwell, you name it, with real enthusiasm. It was “England” to me, incarnate. The English mindset may be insular, etc., but it’s highly evolved. It knows how to express itself.

The England of my grandparents which found itself running an Empire was nether altruistic per se, or naïve per se. It was reflective, and innovative in some odd, but practical ways. It was also highly articulate. It had its own aesthetics, and genuine, if all over the shop, values.

England as an idea is a collection of people of deep roots. Those deep roots may be many things, and almost unique in their local forms, but they speak a language which is mutually understood on many levels.

The minds which created the Empire were a mix of Tudors and Drakes, Adam Smith, and pure business. The East India Company was a virtual empire unto itself, but still connected to the English metier. Opium wars and Jardines may come and go; the idiom remains.

Includes useful information on How To Be English. Insufferable, eh?

An empire based on sheer gall, as the original British Empire was, is inventive by nature as well as by necessity. The tiny little Royal Navy was able to fight its way in to global supremacy, using a unique perspective. It was no accident that the Royal Navy happened to be an effectively invincible force at the times of Napoleon and Hitler.

The most basic idea of England, the island nation, made the Royal Navy a natural first choice of weapon. If your interests are overseas, you must have a navy, and a good one. America would probably be still a member of a very different world if not for the Townshend Acts and a rather unfortunate incumbent monarch.

You could argue that England, left to itself, without the foreign complications, would have continued to pursue its own best interests to this day. World War 1 was an unnecessary obscenity leading to World War 2, a necessary obscenity, but an expensive one. Without those two wars, the British Empire, with its built-in Englishness, would still probably exist, in whatever form.

England was one of the first truly cosmopolitan modern nations, despite itself. “Foreign” has never been a recommendation in England, even if you’re an importer. It’s “there”, not “here”. That’s a mistake on its part. “Here”, by definition, is good. Anywhere else, therefore, isn’t.

Being cosmopolitan didn’t mean in any sense adopting culture; it meant reacting to it. The English sense of superiority, like most of its kind, was based on historical superiority, not some mere bits of relevant information.

It’s odd how the English mindset and those of Imperial China overlapped, even when at war with each other. The culture of England, like that of China, was paramount; it defined the superior. The Chinese thought foreigners barbarians. For the English, simply not being English was quite enough information to denigrate anyone or anything.

Yet – England has produced some of the finest ideas in history. The English mind may not be patentable, but it is interesting. The Industrial Revolution started in England. So did computing, anti-slavery, mental health care, and virtual, if not quite literal, encyclopaedia of other modern ideas.

Those ideas are now globally accepted. The little island, with all its accents, was nevertheless the cornerstone of true modernisation in so many ways. A tide of English personalities, a few Scots and Irish, but on the English stage, changed the world. England was a miniature of what the USA became in the 20th century.

Culture is one of the worst defined of all terms. According to Google, a culture is:

The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.

the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society.

That hardly begins to describe a living society, which is acting continuously in millions of different context. A culture, by definition, is a living thing. It may not be much of a living thing, but it acts like a living thing, trying to survive and prosper.

England’s Glory

The innovations of England were always a form of some practical management; call it greed, call it culture, call it literature; they all came from the same organism.

…Which is why this current pathetic, inward-looking mindset is inherently anti-English. Leaving the EU is as much cosmetic as anything else. Foreigners are inevitable; whether you’re in their club or not doesn’t really matter. The English can always take or leave “there” and its peculiarities.

What matters isn’t the relationships; it’s the benefits. What profit is derived from what is now looking like a petulant, badly managed exercise in cutting one’s own throat? Melodrama, let alone on the world stage, isn’t the English way.

A quiet word, preferably meaningful, is more the preferred English style. One doesn’t have to personally outrun a horse on the race track; one can simply nobble it or beat it in the betting market, or even the breeding market.

England vs Small Ideas

Big ideas do better when not encumbered by small ideas. Being lumbered with pedantry isn’t only annoying, it’s unprofitable. So Brexit, in its ponderous self-importance, is neither here nor there. Lousy navigation, to say the least.

The EU and Brexit are an example of appalling little minds. The EU is a platform. It’s just the stage, not the performers or the play. It’s floorboards, not Falstaff. It’s what you put on that platform that matters. The play’s definitely the thing. It’s also what draws in the audience, and the money.

A more English approach would be accommodating to the point of being comatose, while diligently paddling one’s own canoe somewhere worth going. Why get out of bed, simply to announce you’ll next be throwing yourself out the window?

…Particularly when you have no intention of doing either, given half a chance. Perfidious Albion has a terrible, and thoroughly deserved, reputation, but it also has a reputation for success and intelligence. The English way is to be elegantly enigmatic, superior in assumed social class, but absolutely unfathomable when it’s anything important.

The lack of subtlety and incisive initiative in Brexit and this rather sloppy range of inverse domestic policies is decidedly un-English. Not only are these things much too melodramatic; they don’t work.

Silence and achievement go well together. An enigma is much more respected than a babbling gossip of one’s least impressive issues. A silent response is not only more subject to misinterpretation, but impossible to contradict. Deception is based on misinterpretation, and if someone else is doing the misinterpreting, it’s less effort on your part.

England is a mentality. It may grow actual and social bluebells, and good luck to it, or the true classic English gardens, madly overgrown but truly beautiful. You see why England cannot be grown by fools, particularly noisy fools.

This isn’t the BBC. It should be, but you’re luckier than you think. Welcome to our English for Psychopaths program, now available in tetanus form.

The English language has many uses, not least of which is as a food. It can be spread on almost any topic, or even used in monologues for sexual gratification.

As a food, English can be used as a generative source of energy for action, snivelling, opinions, and even actual thought, in some rare but apparently unavoidable cases.

In recent times it has been reluctantly noticed that there may be other uses for this language. It has also been noted that many groups seem to lack adequate forms of expression, particularly those who are supposedly reduced to practicing management science, becoming thought leaders, or entering politics, as their sole form of interaction with language and other people.

That may not be the case. It’s quite possible that some people are latent managers, undiagnosed thought leaders, or have mutated from human beings in to politicians. It may be that these alleged people have been unfairly singled out from the mass of humanity for simply following evolution’s little practical jokes a bit too far.

The following program explains the English language, its uses, and why so many people who speak English have no idea what they’re talking about and are so happy about it. It also, reassuringly vaguely, demonstrates the fact that those whose native language is English have no idea how to use the language for any purpose whatsoever.

We hope this introductory information will be of use to you in your commendably desperate attempts to avoid relevance of any kind. Remember that you have the right to choose to have no relevance whatsoever to anything, and your understanding of the English language will sail majestically in accordance with your noble aspirations.

A few basic concepts regarding the origins of English, before we start:

England: A place where Attenboroughs swarm in herds.

The Queen of England: The nice lady who kindly rented us the English language.

Britain: A geographically enforced irony of associations with the Scots, Welsh, and Irish to which the English are hopelessly addicted.

The English people: An assortment of cultures, history, dialects, perversions, and Catford, comprised of 70 million people selflessly determined to avoid each other at all costs.

Europe: An unsubstantiated rumour which persists throughout history and which the English would rather ignore, but from which many words have been swiped and conscientiously distorted, mispronounced and misspelled.

France: Yes. We’re sorry about that. It just seems to be there. Perhaps it will go away.

We move on, erratically if sadistically, to basic English. Each word is given in a social context. Linguistics experts believe that this is a true social dynamic, based on the ability to inflict others with information, however useless or idiotically expressed.

This observation, ironically, has led to another – There usually is more than one actual meaning in any statement when speaking English, for however little reason. This is based on the “Unstated Theory”, the belief that only a tiny percentage of actual meaning is deliberately conveyed by talking to anyone about anything. Accidentally useful information may ooze out of a statement, but it’s certainly not a conscious process.

Basic English phrases

The following is a useful collection of common English phrases with colloquial meanings and variations according to conversational context. We’ve chosen a few in context with England itself, to add local reference points, but mainly because it’s much more annoying that way.

Words in bold are actual statements, with their meanings below:

Hello.

Your parents weren’t thinking, were they?

Darwin really was an optimist, wasn’t he?

(This word may also be pronounced as though giving birth to a Mack truck, as required by law in certain social environments.)

Terrible weather.

I’m really a mass murderer, killing people with small talk, and selling subscriptions.

I have a bet with the coroner whether you can form sentences.

I went down the off-license.

My relationship with buildings is ambiguous.

I went to visit my liver.

I want to drink your blood

You look like a teabag, what if I just add some boiling water…?

I’m too cheap to buy a beer.

I’m a house brick

I am now an autonomous structure, hoping to attract others.

I earn a living being inserted in to the heads of other citizens to block drafts.

They’re an interesting couple

I’m an entomologist with time on my hands

We ran out of agar plates, and there they were!

The bus is coming

Our journey to the underworld has begun!

…And why shouldn’t vehicles have orgasms?

I’m going to …. (location)

I feel the need to reproduce and mate with retail outlets.

I was going to go mad, but it’s far too crowded these days.

Yes, I’m a plumber

You probably don’t recognize me without my orchestra and choir.

My god, you’re observant.

It made Britain what she is today

…And someone will scoop it up, eventually. (This expression is generally accepted to refer to any form of mediocrity, however self-important.)

Welcome to Britain!

We really needed another vacuous bastard, we were running out.

We’re motivated sellers.

Take it home and try it on.

“For psychopaths” …

My books, oddly, are about endless different realities. No wonder they don’t sell.

Let’s not be too lazy about the word “psychopath” at this point. The definition of a psychopath is “a person suffering from chronic mental disorder with abnormal or violent social behaviour.”, according to Google. They’d know.

The obvious problem with this definition is that it refers to everybody, in some form. If this ridiculous pseudo-society doesn’t fit the bill as a chronic mental disorder, what does? Yet just about everyone pretends it actually exists, and, bizarrely, has a reason to exist, and behaves accordingly. It’s almost as if they expect this “society” to do something, or mean something.

“Abnormal or violent behavior”, in turn, could also describe the whole of human history, even the interesting bits. A species so obviously determined to be as idiotic as possible as often as possible hardly needs to qualify its terminology specifically “for psychopaths”.

Therefore, English is now the international language of psychopaths, by psychopaths, for psychopaths, to facilitate communications in abnormal behaviour. It’s for everyone. It now facilitates more fraud, crime, wars, ineptitude and insanity than any language before it.

So there.

Paul Wallis note: You’ll be pleased to know that there is also now a cure for the English language – My books. Read a few of these murderous tomes and revel in the total lack of frames of reference, syntax, logic, and useful information of any kind.

Simply buying a few of these books with real money will qualify you for all sorts of pensions, government grants, and other compensations and benefits from terrified professionals in many different academic disciplines. It will also qualify you for heartfelt disbelief from your friends and total strangers alike.

The cure was quite simple – Invent new words and new contexts. Ultimately, that will turn any language, however useful or facile, in to a sort of self-pitying mush. According to Word, my books contain something like 300 completely unprovoked new words.

Yes, if you’re trying to escape from the English language, just read me and it’ll never bother you again.

…Now all I have to do is figure out why I charged myself $200 for adding those last few paragraphs….